To the Russian Colony in North America[3]

Written:Written November 14, 1922Published:Published January 10, 1923 in the newspaperRussky GolosNo. 2046, New York.

      Printed from the typewritten copy collated with the newspaper text.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1971,

      Moscow,Volume 42,

      pages425c-427a.Translated:Bernard IsaacsTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2004).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

ComradeReichel, a representative of the American Society
for Technical Aid for Soviet Russia, told me about the incorrect view on
the New Economic Policy prevalentamong some members of the Russian colony in North America.

Thisincorrect view could, I believe, be the result of deliberate
misinterpretation of this policy by the capitalist press and the ridiculous
tales spread by the embittered whiteguards, who have been driven out of
Soviet Russia, as well as by the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries.

InEurope these tales about us and especially about our New Economic
Policy are falling into disuse. The New Economic Policy has changed nothing
radically in the social system of Soviet Russia, nor can it change anything
so long as the power is in the hands of the workers—and that Soviet power
has come to stay, no one now, I think, can have any doubt. The malignity of
the capitalist press and the influx of Russian whiteguards in America
merely prove our strength.

Thestate capitalism, which is one of the principal aspects of the New
Economic Policy, is, under Soviet power, a form of capitalism that is
deliberately permitted and restricted by the working class. Our state
capitalism differs essentially from the state capitalism in countries that
have bourgeois governments in that the state with us is represented not by
the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat, who has succeeded in winning the
full confidence of the peasantry.

Unfortunately,the introduction of state capitalism with us is not
proceeding as quickly as we would like it. For example, so far we have not
had a single important concession, and without foreign capital to help
develop our economy, the latter’s quick rehabilitation is inconceivable.

Thoseto whom the question of our New Economic Policy—the only
correct policy—is not quite clear, I would refer to the speeches of
Comrade Trotsky and my own speech at the Fourth Congress of the Communist

			    International[1]devoted to this question.

ComradeReichel has told me about the preparatory work which the
Society for Technical Aid is doing to organise American agricultural and
other producers’ communes who wish to come out to work in Russia and intend
to bring with them new instruments of production, tractors, seeds of
improved cultures, and so on.

Ihave already expressed my gratitude to the American comrades in my
letters to the Society for Technical Aid and the Society of Friends of
Soviet Russia in connection with the very successful work of their
agricultural communes and units in Russia in the summer of

				1922.[2]

Itake this opportunity to thank you once more on behalf of the Soviet
Government and to stress the fact that of all the forms of aidthe
aidto our agriculture and improvement of its technical methods is the
most important and valuable for us.

V. Ulyanov(Lenin)

Chairman,Council of People’s Commissars

[1]SeeVol. 33 of this edition, pp. 418-32.—Ed.

[2]Ibid.,pp. 380, 381.—Ed.

[3]TheRussian Colony in the U.S.A. was estimated at about three
million people in the twenties, most of whom were immigrants who had left
Russia before the revolution for political, economic or religious
motives. The members of the bourgeoisie, nobility and intelligentsia, who
had escaped from Russia after the October Socialist Revolution, were an
insignificant minority. The different social and economic status of these
groups and their different attitudes towards Soviet Russia led to the
division of the Russian colony into two hostile camps. One camp was made up
of the Society of Friends of Soviet Russia (Russian section), the Society
for Technical Aid for Soviet Russia, the Russian sections of the
U. S. trade unions, the joint conference of various Russian mutual benefit
societies and other progressive workers’ organisations, around which were
united the majority of colonists. The other camp was an alliance of various
Russian petty-bourgeois and monarchist organisations united around the
anti-Soviet news paperNovoye Russkoye Slovo(The New Russian
Word).

Lenin’sletter was addressed to that part of the Russian colony in the
U.S.A. which was grouped around the organisations that stood for friendly
relations with Soviet Russia.